Stories written by Paul Weinberg Paul Weinberg is a Toronto-based freelancer writer who has written for IPS since 1996. He is also a regular contributor to local weekly magazine NOW and specializes in Canadian politics, in particular foreign, security and defence policy. Paul is currently writing a book on the RCMP’s spying on academics in Canada during the 1960s. | Web

Stephen Harper's ruling Conservative government has managed to muddy the ideological right-wing aspects of his political agenda to stay in power in Canada without alienating his western and rural base of moral and social conservatives.

Amid reports that the Barack Obama administration is quietly lobbying the Conservative government in Ottawa to keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan's Kandahar province beyond 2011, Stephen Harper is finding himself in an increasingly awkward dilemma.

The murky post-9/11 sharing of information between western security and intelligence agencies and Sudan's notorious human rights-abusing regime appear to be at the heart of a year-long marooning of Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik at his country's embassy in Khartoum.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has no choice but to project optimism about his nation's ability to pull out of the economic recession by next year, although various economists and a former central bank chairman have all offered grimmer forecasts that the downturn will persist for a longer period.

Canada's reluctance to institute a full stimulus package in the recent federal government budget has international parallels, says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

A rollercoaster ride of spurned treaties, efforts to fund new weapons and the expansion of potential targets for nuclear strikes under the George W. Bush administration to include Iran and North Korea may be drawing to a close after eight years.

As Canada's parliament debates whether to extend the country's mission in Afghanistan beyond next year's withdrawal deadline, some peace advocates and conflict resolution experts say a U.N.-led mission is the best bet to negotiate a peace settlement involving all of the major parties in the ongoing civil war.

As the Conservative government of Stephen Harper awaits a panel report on Canada's military role in Afghanistan beyond February 2009, when the current mandate expires, there is widespread unease among analysts on both sides of the North American border that operational decisions are deep-sixing political goals and about the possibility of a widening conflict.

United Nations-style peacekeeping is getting a bad rap these days within Canada's military, 60 years after then Prime Minister Lester Pearson came up with the idea of mediating the Suez Crisis following the British-French-Israel attack on Egypt.

Washington's pre-emptive war, in which Muslims are picked up, labeled as Islamic terrorists and then sent to a foreign state where under torture they confess wrongly to membership in al Qaeda, is at the heart of what happened to an innocent Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, says Maureen Webb, an Ottawa lawyer and author of the forthcoming book, "Illusions of Security".

A day before the spectacular arrests of 17 Muslim men under Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act, a McMaster University professor now working in Afghanistan was in Ottawa to tell Canadian officials that their war against the Taliban is ill-advised.

A day before the spectacular arrests of 17 Muslim men under Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act, a McMaster University professor now working in Afghanistan was in Ottawa to tell Canadian officials that their war against the Taliban is ill-advised.

Canadian political scientist Daniel Drache has dubbed Prime Minister Stephen Harper "the stealth man" for his ability, so far, to play down his conservative political instincts while steering a minority government among hostile parties on the centre and left.

In a bid to boost support for Canada's military mission in Afghanistan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently made a surprise two-day visit to his country's troops in the volatile southern province of Kandahar.

Law and order has emerged as one area where a shaky minority government led by the right-wing Conservative party in Canada could reach an agreement with the country's three centre- and centre-left opposition parties.

After its Jan. 23 election, Canada may be headed by a right-wing politician who has successfully sold himself as a nice, friendly and non-ideological individual in an effort to defeat the ruling Liberal party.

Canadian peace activists are trying to head off the usual calls for increased military spending by the two major political parties that tend to coincide with the country's national elections, now set for Jan. 23.